foam3 VS pbrt-v3

Thank you for sharing that video! Your foam project looks fascinating too: https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3

I wrote a BASIC to JS compiler/transpiler that includes all of the programs from "BASIC Computer Games" as examples.

You can try it out in your browser at: https://codepen.io/kgr/full/yLQyLjR

Just select the game you want to to run from the top-left list box, then press the "Compile" button and you'll see the translated JS source in the right text-area. Then press the "Run" button to run it.

The source code for the compiler is available at: https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3/tree/429f2fd2b4cef0e37996a...

Sort of related but an interesting idea is take it one step further with the Feature Oriented Active Modeler (FOAM) [1,2] paradigm and use code to model your whole system, which generates diagrams model, and runnable code in whatever language needed. The project is still young and it may not be practical today with the available tooling but it seems like a cool idea and project. It is influenced by the unix principle of “coding the perimeter not the area” which is essentially factoring your dev tasks into building NM capabilities, but instead of building NM things individually build N+M tools that can be composed into N*M capabilities [2].

So with FOAM the idea is if we want to maintain a model of our software, and build it as well, what if we can use one composable tool to generate both, rather than model everything and code it separately.

[1] https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3

[2] https://foam-framework.github.io/foam/

[3] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ea3pkTCYx4

https://github.com/kgrgreer/foam3#videos

FOAM is a modelling framework that generates cross-language boilerplate for you, but it takes a much broader view of what constitutes boilerplate than most systems. Typically, it can generate between 95-98% of a working cross-language cross-tier system.

FOAM helps you create features for modelled data. Features include things like a Java/Javascript/Swift classes to hold your modelled data, code to marshall to/from JSON/XML/CSV/etc., various GUI Views, and support for storing your data in various databases or file formats. However, FOAM models are themselves modelled, meaning they're afforded all of the above benefits as well. This lets you apply the MVC technique of having multiple views work against the same underlying data-model concurrently (say a grid and a pie-chart in a spreadsheet), so that you can choose the best view or views for your current need. When treated this way, your code is no longer text (but it can be, if that's one of your views), and you can easily view and store it in many different ways and more easily programmatically manipulate it.

Physically Based Rendering[0] was an excellent textbook when I read it ages ago and conveniently enough it looks to have been updated with a new edition last year.

[0]: https://pbrt.org/

Physically Based Raytracing

Both of these books are free, and both are written in C++, but they can be done in any language. The first book, a raytracer in a weekend, is part of a series, you can find it here: https://raytracing.github.io/ And, if you get to the third book in that series, or you need a reference book, the PBRT book covers the math in more depth and discusses the latest theory, you can get the last edition of the book (5 years out of date) for free though: https://pbrt.org/

Making a “complete” one is a never-ending rabbit hole you can spend a lifetime on and is a very active area of research covering more advanced geometry, probability, optics, machine learning etc etc. A great introduction to that is https://pbrt.org

This isn't the highest priority but if you haven't already, learn how computer graphics works. Get a working knowledge of the camera matrix, real time graphics (say, OpenGL but threeJS is an option), and photorealistic graphics. PBRT is the go-to for photorealistic graphics. The first two books of Foundations of Game Engine Development are way more useful than they have any right to be (and my favorite textbooks I've ever read, 10/10).

Org-mode strength though is in working with different languages in a same source file, which I am not sure if Knuths version does. Anyway, to see how the original idea looks like, check the Wikipedia article, or to see it in real-life see some of books that are written in the literate style, like Physically Based Rendering, which seems to be available for free nowadays or C Interfaces and Implementations.

I contributed a tiny bit to pbrt[1], and one of the things I loved was that if you just plugged in physical values you almost always got great results with minimal tweaking.

The Octane data seems most complete at first glance (with complex IOR etc), but for things like milk and blood I expected at the very least some absorption coefficient for the translucency or similar.

[1]: https://pbrt.org/